Twitter blocking Malicious shortened URLS?

Skeeter and I began engaging on Twitter in December of 2008. Since that time we have seen
Shortened URLS used as the primary link in updates (aka tweets). It makes good sense to use these shortened URLS considering that some URLS seem longer than the Mississippi River and a twitter user only gets 140 characters per tweet.

Personally, we love the shortened URLs. The downfall, is that we don’t really know whats on the other side of these short links. What we do know is that many spammers and hackers are taking advantage of “certain” shortened URLS by hiding malicious infectious sites behind the URLS.

The good news is Twitter appears to be blocking Malicious shortened URLS now. For example, users that try sending tweets that link back to known infected sites get a new message on their main twitter screen that says: “Oops! Your tweet contained a URL to a known malware site!”

If you use a 3rd party twitter client, tool or app like tweetdeck or tweetlater that has a shortened URL integrated within their system, keep an eye out for the blocking malicious shortened URLS. Afterall, its for the good and for everyones protection.

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19 Responses to “Shortened URLs”

Hi guys, love your updates. Another good piece of news depends upon the service you use and browser plugin availability. For example, one shortening service I use with some services is bit.ly and the FireFox plugin reveals the destination of the target URL as well as the number of clicks on that link. This, too, can protect you.

Al and Skeeter, I have been having similar problems with TinyURL.com as it is being blocked by my ZoneAlarm firewall. Can’t get around it with exceptions, either.

However, I have been using Go2-URL.com (http://go2-url.com/) for several years now, and have never had a problem with them. To my knowledge, they have never had a problem with malware/trojans/viruses, etc., but given time, I guess hackers will probably hit them, too.

To date, they’ve been doing great as they are one of the “lesser known” URL re-direction and shortening services. They’re still free, and you have an unlimited number of URLs you can put into their system.

I guess I could leave it to you guys to check it out and see if it’s worth recommending.

Thanks for this post! Some shortened URLs are false positive. Eg. tweetbucks.com shorten decent science URLs and yet the re-directed bitl.y links say the link may be malware or phishing site EVEN before the shortened link has even been tweeted. This made me stop uing tweetbucks.com (for now!)

That’s awesome. I have been very weary about clicking on links sent by other tweeters. Now I can open my trust to them a little more knowing that Twitter is fighting the war on spammers. Thanks Al and Skeeter. Keep up the great job you are doing to keep Twitter safe and entertaining.

Approaching the problem from another angle: I use Web of Trust (WOT) that can be downloaded as a Firefox add-on at http://www.mywot.com/

The service warns about suspicious content on the site a URL points to before letting you in. You can, however, should you so wish. As far as I can tell, their database is pretty well up to date.

You can also rate sites on a number of criteria yourself. The service accumulates these user ratings and uses them to further determine the target site’s reliability. At the moment, they claim to have more than 24 million sites rated.

(Full disclosure: I am just a happy user, not affiliated to the service in any way.)